Daniel Lee Corwin was born in Orange County, California on September 13, 1958. At seventeen he abducted, raped and tried to kill a classmate, and was sentenced to forty years. He was paroled after nine, and was still on parole for that offence throughout 1987.
Alice Martin, seventy-two, was taken on February 13, 1987 while out on her daily walk along a farm road in Madison County. He drove her to a remote part of Robertson County, raped her in the front of his truck, strangled her with a ligature and stabbed her four times in the back. Her body was found the next day in a field.
Debra Lynn Ewing, twenty-six, was abducted at gunpoint from where she worked in Huntsville on July 10, 1987. He drove her into Montgomery County, raped her, strangled her with a ligature and stabbed her twice in the chest. Her body was found two days later. A witness gave a detailed description of the man who took her, and it led nowhere.
Mary Carrell Risinger, thirty-six, was washing her car at a Huntsville car wash on Halloween evening, 1987. He tried to force her into his truck; when she fought, he stabbed her in the throat, severing every major blood vessel in her neck. Her three-year-old daughter was in the car and watched. The child was not harmed.
None of the three was connected to the others at the time. Another man was briefly investigated over the Martin killing and ruled out.
What identified him was a woman who lived. On October 20, 1988 he abducted Wendy Gant, a twenty-one-year-old student, from a car park at Texas A&M. He bound, raped, beat and stabbed her, tied her to a tree and cut her throat. She survived. Unable to speak because of her injuries, she worked with a forensic artist in writing to produce a composite sketch. A corrections officer recognised the face in it as Corwin, who was on parole at the time. A fingerprint from her car tied him to the attack.
He pleaded guilty in 1989 to attempted capital murder and was sentenced to ninety-nine years. A little over a month later he confessed to the three 1987 killings.
The prosecution then used a law that had only just come onto the books, allowing a capital charge where murders are committed in separate criminal transactions but pursuant to the same scheme or course of conduct. On March 17, 1990 Corwin became the first person convicted under the Texas serial killer statute, and was sentenced to death.
He spent eight years on death row and was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit on December 7, 1998, at forty. In his last statement he thanked two people by name, expressed remorse to the families of the women he had killed, and questioned the use of capital punishment. He was the twentieth person executed in Texas that year.
Reference works differ on the dates of this case. One gives the span as February to July 1988 rather than 1987. The court record is consistent: the three murders were committed in February, July and October 1987, and the arrest followed the attack on Wendy Gant in October 1988. One popular account gives the execution year as 1989, which is wrong.